The Wedding Night

by Harriet Walker

  On day five, the man’s girlfriend came back early from a work trip. The weather broke and Lizzie walked all the way back to college in the rain, wearing the tight and rather brief minidress she’d been out clubbing in almost a week before. Her blond hair hung in wet streamers around her face; her eyes were red and swollen. Effie and Anna never even found out the man’s name: he was known as Shithead forever more.

  Lizzie took it badly, stopped eating and barely got dressed. She had seen a life she wanted and she mourned it, even though it had been a mirage—an escape to ordinary as her finals loomed. The exams were two months away, dissertations due in one.

  They took turns looking after her, Anna spooning soup into Lizzie’s mouth as she stared at the walls, Effie dragging her to the showers and persuading her to wash her lank hair. But as time passed, Lizzie grew more lethargic, not less. What little food she forced down settled about her jawline and her waist like an extra layer of bulky clothing. She had agonizing, temple-splitting headaches, and her gums began to bleed. It was only when she theatrically puked on the wall tiles of hers and Effie’s shared kitchen that they recognized the symptoms from TV.

  Effie made the appointment and went with her, stroked her hair and brought her hot water bottles for the days afterward as Lizzie lay, cramping, in bed. Anna brought noodles through from her room down the hall, encouraged them to eat vegetables, tried to remind them both to study when they could. Exams were three weeks away, dissertations due in one, and Lizzie had barely started hers.

  Effie blinked a tear out of her eye and it rolled over the bridge of her nose, where she lay on her side, and dripped onto the French linen.

  She couldn’t help feeling that Lizzie had used her, again.

  45.

  Anna

  “Did you put the ring on because you were so unhappy with the one I gave you?”

  Steve’s lovely, lined faced was careworn with drying tears. The pain Anna had experienced trying to soap the fucking thing off was nothing compared to this.

  After she had left Effie to sleep, Anna had found her husband and told him what she had seen on the wedding night. He had gone very quiet.

  She’d thought he would be angry with her for not telling him about the scene she had stumbled across, hazy as her recollection of it was, but his upset at the fact of her having put on the alien wedding ring was far stronger. His tears reminded her of the stormy emotions she often had to contend with during one of Sonny’s tantrums—the little tyrant with Steve’s face could rage for what felt like hours on end if he felt particularly hard done by.

  Steve was far better than she was at remaining calm until the storm had passed and Sonny had been put successfully to bed; Steve would wait until he had a cold beer in his hand before blowing the stress away with one heavy out-breath. Now, in the library, his sadness was as noisy and abundant as that of the tiny person they had made together, who Anna was beginning to ache for.

  “No, Stevo, I just…I was drunk. I felt like I needed a change.” She spread her hands where she sat, opposite him on a sofa that either he or Iso had slept on and that the two of them had reclaimed in grand style only a couple of days ago.

  “A change?” Steve’s eyebrows and Adam’s apple shot up like a fairground high striker. “Is there somebody else?”

  “God, no! No, no—that’s not what I meant at all,” Anna sighed and rubbed her face.

  She thought of how much she had enjoyed Lizzie’s engagement party, how when she had sat at the bar while Steve packed away his records, she had wondered—briefly—what it might feel like to be going home with someone else. The thought had gone no further; it could never have happened—and yet she had felt guilty for months afterward about what she might have meant in her mind.

  Somebody else. She almost laughed at the notion, but stopped herself just in time. She appreciated Steve’s faith in her ability to have met somebody else, but the logistics were hardly stacked in her favor. Her working hours, for one. The fact that when she wasn’t at her desk she was usually with Sonny, for another. She wore funereal suits and a gown for her nine to five; away from work, she haunted supermarkets and soft-play cafés rather than bars.

  Christ, Steve is far more likely to meet someone else than I am.

  That no man had even glanced at Anna since she’d given birth was one unassailable hurdle to her having an affair—and one she despised herself for even using as a metric for her own sense of self-worth. That the very idea of revealing her deflated, puckered, and battle-scarred body to anyone who wasn’t Steve made her want to cry was the final, incontrovertible reason why, no, there was categorically no one else. Not that she wanted there to be. She remembered watching Effie enviously at the airport, giggly and flirtatious with Ben—and just look what he had been up to behind everyone’s backs.

  The memory of the wedding night and of Effie’s tears rose in her throat; she was finding Lizzie and Ben’s dishonesty hard to stomach.

  Anna knew women who were raising children by themselves. There was Celia, for one, but many more at the local playgroups and libraries, and she marveled at the reserves of inner strength they must have to care for a child alone, when both she and Steve were regularly punch-drunk by the end of a day spent doing so between them.

  She listened, over coffee and the heads of their adored children, to their hooted tales when they resumed dating again while thinking she would rather pull out her own teeth than make sexy small talk with a man she didn’t know, would happily set herself alight instead of offering up to someone new the wasteland she hid under her ever-baggier clothes.

  Perhaps this was where she had been going wrong with Steve. Reveling in their familiarity even as it bred contempt between them. Forgetting that her husband was not, in fact, an extension of herself and Sonny but another person who might enjoy sexy small talk, who might want to visit the wasteland every so often.

  She wrapped Steve—tall, thin, lovely Steve—in her arms what felt two or three times over. She wanted to bind him to her, to make them both one person. Anna felt like she was sewing a limb back on that she had temporarily lost.

  “I think we need to change some stuff,” she said. “Well, I do really. I need to stop being so tense and so impatient with you.”

  She breathed out. “And with Son.”

  Steve took her hand, the red, raw one that had been held under the tap for the past half-hour as they’d both tried to remove a wedding ring that wasn’t her own. It had eventually squeaked off and clinked into the bottom of the vast porcelain sink in the kitchen. They reunited it with its pair—the other Bertie had found, rolled away under a chair in the Hall.

  “You are a wonderful mother,” Steve told her, holding her eyes with his.

  Anna started to cry again then, because it was the constant and wearying suspicion that this was not the case that lay at the heart of why she was so stressed, why she disliked herself so much, why she medicated with so many cookies.

  “And I’m sorry for being so crap.” Steve rubbed his eyes so hard it made the carefully moisturized skin around her own smart in sympathy. “I’m really, really sorry for letting you down.”

  “You’re not crap,” she said, soothing him, and she knew then that he wasn’t really. Whatever the wedding night’s high jinks might have looked like the next morning, it was nowhere near what her mind had turned it into. Steve was not that man; he never would be.

  After Sonny’s birth, Anna had spent her maternity leave feeding and weaning, soothing and routine-ing. When she returned to work to sit at her vast desk, and to take difficult clients to lunch in dimly lit but keenly priced dim sum restaurants and City-boy steakhouses, then fight for them in court, Steve swapped in. Tapping away on his laptop at their kitchen table on one of their dilapidated dining chairs while Sonny was at nursery school, then persuading him—a trickier customer even than many of Anna’s—to eat his fish fingers
and beans every evening. This was as close to equality as parenting came, except Steve was more likely than her to end up covered in tomato sauce.

  Hers was a better deal than the ones most of the mothers she knew had struck with their partners. Some of them didn’t work and saw the lights go out behind their husbands’ eyes as soon as they started talking about their day at home. Some of them did and were expected to do the bulk of everything else anyway. Others relied on a complex patchwork of help from grandparents and neighbors and cleaning ladies and office juniors that cost them more in gratitude and resentment than even the most extortionate nursery fees.

  Women from each of those categories exclaimed over Steve, and this, Anna thought, was really the thing she found annoying—not him. The fact that he wasn’t doing anything another woman hadn’t, and yet praise was heaped upon him for it just as surely as nobody seemed to remark on how hard she was working, how stretched thin she was.

  Anna knew men—worked with men—who would talk about the mothers of their children as though they were sainted martyrs, broken on the wheel of nappy rash and BuggyFit, a zealot’s glint in their eyes at the hardships their wives faced and the sacrifices those beneficent, long-suffering women had made. Those men bought them designer handbags for Christmas and diamond rings for their VBAC—billable gestures with a value that offset how little help they actually offered at home and that Steve would never lavish on her but Anna sometimes thought she might want. But how many of those men would help clean actual worms from their child’s bumhole as he had? Steve had even sung “One Wink at a Time” by the Replacements as he’d done it.

  When those men’s baby daughters got overlooked for an award or a first-class degree, started working and didn’t get the same pay or promotions, had a baby and found themselves unofficially demoted in the office—would they realize they’d had a hand in it? Probably not.

  And none of this, Anna reiterated inside her own head, was Steve’s fault.

  So why take it out on him?

  “I’m sorry for being a cow, Stevo,” she whispered.

  “You’re not a cow,” he smiled, pink-eyed, and persuaded her horizontal once more.

  46.

  Lizzie

  At first I wondered whether it was my fault—and then I understood. Men like Ben make you question your own behavior so that you won’t see that it’s theirs that is problematic.

  I thought at first that perhaps if I had just been a little kinder, a little more sensitive, taken more care with his feelings, not led him on, it might not have happened. I was so caught up in those early days with Dan, I didn’t realize what Ben was at first. I know now what a fragile, dangerous thing the male ego is: like a plant that needs watering and constant attention or it withers and poisons the water supply for everything else in the vicinity.

  We are taught to nurture it in ways we don’t even realize. Lower your voice. Laugh at his jokes. Giggle your way through this encounter, because it’s easier than taking issue with how he just spoke to you. Pretend you can’t manage by yourself so you don’t seem like a threat—whether it’s a photocopier, a car, or a condom.

  Anything to avoid triggering the nail bomb they all wear just beneath their clothes. Even the ones in plaid shirts and nice suits. Especially the ones in nice suits.

  I had my first taste of it at Cambridge—the lost week, Anna and Effie called it. The lost six months, it became, after I graduated and couldn’t get out of bed for the rest of the year.

  I hated myself for having let down another woman—the one who let herself into her boyfriend’s home to find me, practically a child still, sitting in his armchair wearing one of his T-shirts and reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Her mouth in an O, her eyebrows raised in surprise—but her face soon closed up that shocked expression like a blind rolling down on a window.

  “Oh, another one,” she sighed, as I rushed to grab my belongings and leave.

  She must have been around the same age I am now.

  I hated myself for having been so naïve. By the time I got back to college I was so catatonic with self-loathing, I couldn’t write the dissertation I’d been avoiding even if I’d wanted to.

  So Effie wrote it for me.

  She started it as soon as we got back from the clinic where I’d taken the tablets. Where as I’d left, a homely woman around my mother’s age and wearing a bonnet wreathed with flowers had pressed gory literature into my hands and told me I was eternally damned.

  As I shivered and heaved in my bed, racked with pains I thought would break my back and my hips—would empty me until I was hollow—Effie tapped away on her computer next door. She authored seven thousand extra words in addition to her own paper on Emily Dickinson about how modernity is the corrupting force at the heart of the male-female dynamic in Thomas Hardy. He wasn’t wrong: just imagine how Alec d’Urberville would have treated women if he’d had an iPhone, or sanctimonious Angel Clare with a righteous Twitter account.

  Effie quoted from reams of books she had read and I hadn’t bothered to; she gave me her eloquence, her breadth of knowledge. She loaned it to me for the future, so I could leave university and start my life again.

  Blood on water. My baby was a raspberry in a bowl. I flushed it away in the girls’ loos of our student block.

  What is it Hardy says? “Women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye.”

  And I did eventually. But clearly, I learned nothing from it.

  The night we met—or re-met, I should say, at the engagement party—Ben and I made innocent-sounding, awkward small talk. I was flustered, more by the context than by his presence. Surrounded by friends who had gathered to celebrate my getting married to another man, I guppy-mouthed and hedged while Ben asked increasingly banal questions. About our relationship, our engagement, my heart, he asked not a word.

  It is not simple, hunting a person with your eyes when you are the focus of everybody else’s in the room.

  I next saw the top of his head all the way across the crowd when I was on the dance floor with Eff, attempting the self-conscious shuffle of the woman who feels herself to be under observation, intimidatingly but deliciously so.

  Except I wasn’t. Ben wasn’t even looking my way.

  When he pulled me into the cloakroom later, it was the first contact we’d had since our handshake, and it was like I’d been branded with his touch—a burning patch on my arm where he had held it and steered me toward the back of the small room, behind the rails of coats.

  “God,” he said, running one hand through his hair, breathing out forcefully through his mouth—whoosh—as though he were expelling the tension between us.

  Close up for the first time in a year, those bottomless blue eyes, perfect teeth, strong jaw, and burly shoulders had almost the same effect on me as they had the first time round. I felt my stomach swoop toward my feet when I remembered how infatuated I had been with him back then.

  Despite that, I saw the insecurity flash through him as he started talking. Though he practically filled up the tiny space with his burliness, Ben seemed smaller in here than he had before. Than he had that night all those months ago.

  I realized in that moment that the Ben I had fallen so hard for was a figment I’d built up into something more. Dan was the real thing, a thousand times more real than the rooftop in Bangkok.

  “So, this is weird,” Ben continued, laughing but without humor.

  “Such a small world,” I murmured. “You can’t escape your demographic, I guess.”

  I could have prattled on with platitudes for a while longer, but he stopped me.

  “Look, I wouldn’t tell Dan about us if I were you. He’d find it too weird.”

  I nodded, grateful to him for the advice. It hadn’t yet crossed my mind that my fiancé might have an opinion on a previous
life of mine that had inadvertently intersected with his. Though Dan mentioned his school friend Ben regularly, he rarely used his full name; I never added the man saved in my phone as “Ben Bangkok” to my Facebook, where the link lay waiting to be discovered. We never stumbled across it—until we did. In person.

  “I know what he’s like about stuff like this,” Ben continued in the dark of the cloakroom. “He’s the kind of guy that wouldn’t be able to get past it—not with me.”

  I knew that Dan was a thoughtful sort of guy—far more thoughtful than anybody else I’d ever been with. I knew he was a considerate sort of guy, too. If being a bit jealous was the flip side of those qualities…Well, we all have our flaws, I told myself.

  “No, of course,” I said. “I see. Let’s just leave it, it was nothing.”

  Ben’s features tightened briefly. “That’s right,” he said firmly. “Nothing.”

  Nevertheless, I felt a cold tide rising from my velvet-clad feet. I swayed slightly where I stood, hemmed in by the dimensions of the room, of Ben in front of me, of things I had done before I had even met Dan. I’d never wanted the man who would be my husband to feel anything but admiration and love for me. I certainly didn’t want to ruin what we had or the friendship he’d shared with Ben since they were both eleven.

  He put a hand on my shoulder and looked deep into my eyes, so far that I felt I was standing there in front of him naked. Again.

  “That’s why I won’t tell him,” he said, with a sad, regretful smile playing around his white lips. “I won’t tell him about all those texts you sent me,” he added, with a doleful flourish. “Even though you two lovebirds had met by then, I think?”